WHAT CAN We Do ABOUT IT

The Bureau of What Can We Do About It? is a genre-defying novel in ten comic strips, plus a bonus edition of five sealed files. The body is a government; the mind is an intelligence bureau. Every morning, Life slides a single message under the door: "What can we do about it?" The message is never decoded. It is filed, fought, forgotten, acted upon—and then received again, in a new envelope, wearing a new face. Mort, the everyman protagonist, encounters this question in ten absurd situations: a waiting room where the ticket number is a question mark; a family dinner with an empty chair and a napkin folded into a bird that files reports directly to the Question; an office meeting where the line is flat and the follow-up meeting is the same meeting; a traffic jam on a highway that loops, with a billboard advertising Mort; a wedding where the ring is missing and the bride and groom are identical; a funeral where the deceased attends and speaks for the first time in eleven years; a supermarket where every shelf is empty except aisle seven, which holds one product: the question; a space station where first contact is the question; a courtroom where Mort is on trial for being alive, the judge is Time, the prosecutor is Wi-Fi, and the jury is twelve versions of his mother; and a final blank page where Mort speaks the line himself. Every speech balloon in every strip contains exactly one line of dialogue: "What can we do about it?" The Bureau files memos, issues forms Q-1 through Q-10, and deletes panels for being too legible, too honest, or too true. The question never changes. The situation always does. The novel is a darkly comic, philosophical meditation on the unanswerable question that comes with life itself. It cannot be solved. It can only be lived. At the end, the question becomes the reader. Action pending. The Bureau remains open. Always. The final panel shows the reader holding the book, with the same speech balloon. The question has changed shape again. It is now the shape of you. What can we do about it?